Reading the Land: Aldo Leopold’s Conservation Legacy

Text by Hutch Brown; photos from Wikimedia Commons.

Believe it or not, we once faced a timber crisis in the United States: by the late 1800s, we were logging forests much faster than they could regrow. Warning of a “timber famine,” President Theodore Roosevelt launched a national campaign to conserve America’s forests for future generations.

Since then, conservationists have come to see America’s forested landscapes less as expendable stores of commercial timber and more as natural communities of soils, waters, plants, and animals, every part of which must be conserved to sustain the whole. No one in the 20th century contributed more to this holistic view of the land than did Aldo Leopold.

Born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, Leopold spent his boyhood exploring the nearby Mississippi River and roaming the local woods. He enrolled in the Yale School of Forestry and, upon graduating in 1909, joined the U.S. Forest Service, which President Roosevelt had founded in 1905. Its mission was to conserve the nation’s forests, partly by managing millions of acres of national forests, mostly in the West. The Forest Service seemed like the place to be for a young conservationist.

As a forest ranger in the Southwest, Leopold witnessed widespread watershed degradation. Forest Service policy at the time was to kill native wolves on sight to create a “hunters’ paradise” for deer, drawing hunters from states like Virginia where deer had been extirpated and thereby building public support for the national forests. Slaughtering wolves disrupted the natural balance: without wolves to cull the deer herds, overgrazing destroyed the native vegetation that held the thin soils in place. “Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea,” Leopold concluded in his landmark essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain.”

That essay appeared in 1949 as part of Leopold’s signature work, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, a collection of essays about the relationships that Leopold had seen in nature and his insights into how healthy land works and what it needs. Leopold’s many essays were based on his early experiences with the Forest Service and, later, in managing the abandoned farm he bought in south-central Wisconsin. By then, he was serving as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the field of wildlife management. Leopold was also a powerful wilderness advocate who regarded the opportunity to explore “a blank spot on the map” as an American birthright. He was instrumental in establishing the nation’s first wilderness area in 1924, the Gila Wilderness in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico.

Even after leaving the Forest Service in 1928, Leopold saw a continuing role for government in conservation—but he no longer saw it as the key. In 1933, he wrote that the “real end [of conservation] is a universal symbiosis with land, economic and esthetic, public and private. To this school of thought public ownership is a patch but not a program.” By then, Leopold had come to see healthy land as an organic whole across landownerships, with a flourishing symbiosis among its interdependent parts—soils and waters, plants and animals, and (yes) people. Most lands, including the most productive forestlands, were in private hands, and Leopold now saw them as the key. He therefore turned his attention to the management of farms and private forestlands.

So did the Forest Service and the conservation agencies that were founded in the 1930s under the New Deal. The government approach was to induce sound land management through financial incentives and technical support, which Leopold saw as necessary but not sufficient. In 1939, he wrote that he no longer believed that “a little ‘bait’ for the farmer, either in cash, service, or protection, is going to move him to active custodianship of wildlife. … It must grow from inside, and slowly.”

In 1947, in one of his final essays (tragically, he died in 1949 while fighting a wildfire), Leopold wrote that “conservation can accomplish its objectives only when it springs from an impelling conviction on the part of private land owners.” Government programs were not enough, nor was economic self-interest. The evidence was clear: even after numerous spending programs over decades and numerous inducements of all kinds, the “man-land community,” as Leopold described it, was unraveling fast. Today, in an era of climate change, the ecological integrity of our lands is unraveling faster than ever—from melting glaciers in the Cascades and Rockies, to dying forests in Alaska and Colorado, to horrendous wildfires in Arizona and California, to the decline or disappearance in the mid-Atlantic states of birds like red-cockaded woodpecker, native predators like red wolves, major forest trees like American chestnuts, and more.

In view of such challenges, Leopold’s notions of conservation apply to both his time and ours: conservation cannot be decreed from above but must be learned and embraced from below. Conservation is not measured in terms of acres of wilderness designated, no matter how necessary they are; nor is it measured in number of endangered species listed, no matter how vital it is to protect even “the meanest flower that blows,” as Leopold once put it.

Conservation is fundamentally a matter of ethics and aesthetics—of what Leopold called “building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.” When ordinary citizens accept the ethical underpinnings of their activities on the land; when they are curious enough to learn about the land in all of its workings; when they come to see and enjoy the wonder and beauty of how the land works; and when they are willing to give up some measure of heedless and needless material comfort to keep the land healthy in all of its parts—then and only then, as Leopold put it, “conservation may follow.”

In the foreword to A Sand County Almanac, Leopold summed it up this way: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” That same visionary land ethic inspires naturalists and conservationists today. Like Leopold, we see the land as a community of soils, waters, plants, animals, and people, and we strive to sustain and restore the functioning of its interdependent parts in all of their complexity, in good part through conservation education. “Once you learn to read the land,” Leopold once told his students, “I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.”

The blog is based on the author’s readings of works by and about Aldo Leopold and on a speech he wrote in 2009 for Sally Collins, former director of the USDA Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets, at the Aldo Leopold Graduation Centennial, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT.